# Alice Marie Johnson American criminal-justice-reform advocate appointed to the newly created White House position of "pardon czar" in February 2025. Johnson served more than two decades of a life sentence for a first-time nonviolent federal drug conviction before her sentence was commuted in 2018 and she received a full pardon in Donald Trump's first term; the role makes her, in effect, the most visible entry point to the informal clemency track described in [[The Pardon and Clemency Pipeline]]. The position has no statutory basis, requires no Senate confirmation, and appears nowhere in the executive-clemency regulations at 28 C.F.R. Part 1. Johnson has described presenting cases to the President directly in the Oval Office alongside the White House Counsel. Reporting in February 2026 described her access to the President as having been narrowed during late 2025 amid internal concern over the optics of who was profiting from clemency advocacy, with several scheduled presentation meetings cancelled; her access subsequently widened again in early 2026. She requested designation as a special government employee, which caps her service at 130 days per calendar year and permits outside income. In early September 2026 she announced a group of roughly 30 clemency grants — an announcement made from the White House rather than by the Justice Department, which is itself a marker of which track is operating. **Status:** stub — expand with a grant-by-grant record of cases she has advocated, and with her own commutation and pardon history. ## See also - [[The Pardon and Clemency Pipeline]] — the process map she sits inside - [[Pardon Power]] · [[Pardons as Currency]] - [[Trump 2025 Pardon Spree]] · [[J6 Mass Pardons]] - [[Susie Wiles]] · [[Will Scharf]] · [[Ed Martin]]